After Olympic triathlon champion goes No.2 on UK all-time marathon rankings, what can the working world be taught from his success
Alex Yee’s 2:06:38 marathon in Valencia on Sunday was a triumph for triathlon and the immense cardio advantages of swim-bike-run coaching. Not for the primary time, an athlete who spends as a lot, if no more, time biking and swimming as they do working has excelled in a footrace.
Again in 2013, Alistair Brownlee ranked No.3 within the UK over 10,000m behind Mo Farah and Chris Thompson. Since then now we have seen triathletes like Beth Potter and Hugo Milner get pleasure from success in working races. Now, Yee has gone No.2 within the UK all-time marathon rankings – and is second solely to Farah’s 2:05:11 nationwide report.
How can these ‘part-time runners’ beat the ‘full-time runners’?
Again in 2018 I requested Malcolm Brown, coach to the Brownlee brothers, who mentioned bluntly: “They do about twice the variety of hours per week of cardio coaching at senior ranges.”
In the identical dialog, he added prophetically: “Yee is a particular expertise at working, as we all know.”
That is actually true. After making an honest marathon debut of two:11:08 in London in April, Yee swiped four-and-a-half minutes off his finest in Valencia.
A former English Colleges cross-country champion, Yee memorably out-sprinted Chris Thompson and Andy Vernon to win the British 10,000m title at Highgate in 2018. The general race was gained that evening, by the way, by Richard Ringer – a German distance runner who notably boosts his coaching with a number of hours of biking every week, typically incorporating it into his warm-ups and warm-downs.
To provide an concept of how onerous triathletes work, I noticed first-hand a “day within the life” of the Brownlee brothers about 10 months earlier than the London Olympics. We had been visiting the Barcelona triathlon and Alastair and Jonny had been there on behalf of one among their sponsors.
On the day of journey they squeezed in an early-morning swim earlier than catching an 8.30am flight from Leeds-Bradford Airport. Then, on arriving at their lodge in Barcelona, they went straight out for a motorcycle experience, adopted by a 40-50-minute run. Apparently it was their end-of-season relaxation interval too.
Maybe among the world’s prime runners are getting the trace. Cole Hocker, the Olympic 1500m and world 5000m champion, dietary supplements his working with a number of miles every week on a motorcycle. He informed AW final 12 months that he did round two to 4 hours on a motorcycle every week, including: “Cross-training is a giant a part of our coaching.”
Jakob Ingebrigtsen is amongst those that stay sceptical, although. Once we put Hocker’s cross-training behavior to the Norwegian, he mentioned: “If anyone thinks they’re good at working as a result of they do a whole lot of swimming then they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Ingebrigtsen added that cross-training when you find yourself match to run is “very unusual”, including that he solely does cross coaching (normally aqua jogging) when he can’t run which, paradoxically, has been rather a lot recently.
So if you’re a budding endurance runner or the coach of an formidable distance runner, are you keen to spend quite a few hours on a motorcycle every week within the pursuit of a PB? As Yee and others have proven us, it would offer you an cardio enhance that you simply’re unlikely to achieve from working alone.
